Across all industries, organizations reported spending $414 per full-time employee in 2025 on L&D. The continued investment is built on the gains of past L&D efforts, but today’s L&D faces unique challenges, from skills shortages to economic uncertainty. Forty percent of L&D leaders cited economic uncertainty as a challenge, with 21% citing it as their top macroeconomic challenge, according to SHRM’s 2026 L&D Executives: Priorities and Perspectives report.
While the economy is top of mind for many leaders, L&D investment overall has grown over time, demonstrating organizations’ commitment to developing talent and maintaining a competitive workforce. In 2025, L&D spending by U.S. corporations and education institutions with more than 100 employees reached $102.8 billion, up from $83.5 billion in 2020, according to Training’s Industry report.
What have these investments brought to the execution of L&D initiatives across industries? The most obvious shifts are in how learning gets delivered, how success gets measured, and what role technology plays. In the second part of this two-part series, SHRM spoke to practitioners about the fundamental changes they’ve experienced in L&D.
Delivery: From Fixed Rooms to Flexible Cohorts
Lori Oviatt, a learning solution consultant, operated a classroom model that was unilateral and product-based. For example, she and her team were tasked with bringing entire teams up to speed on a single computer language. Over time, the pendulum swung hard in the opposite direction, toward vast self-directed digital libraries where learners could help themselves. That correction was overshot, according to Matthew Daniel, senior talent strategy and mobility principal at Guild, an education benefits company based in Denver.
In a previous role, Daniel saw completion rates of less than 3% for available programs. The industry had mistaken access for engagement. "We went through sheer craziness for 15 or 20 years ... where we're just going to generate e-learning that nobody really likes," Daniel said.
What he sees now is a deliberate return to depth. “We’re seeing a return to cohorts, to in-depth talent development — not just enablement and surface-level training,” Daniel said.
Oviatt echoed the shift toward specificity, describing a move from generic product training to role-based, solution-based design mapped to the real scenarios employees face.
Metrics: From Counting Heads to Measuring Capability
In the earlier era, evaluation rarely went beyond a paper survey. Learners rated a session on a 1-to-5 scale, and those sheets, as Oviatt remembers, were seldom analyzed and often ended up discarded in a cabinet.
Today's leaders rejected that approach outright. “Today we no longer look at numbers,” said Hakeem Basheer, senior manager of learning programs at Carnival Corporation. “We look at capability, not activity. If we're still counting completions, we're measuring the wrong thing."
The measure that matters, he said, is time to competency — how quickly an employee can actually apply a skill on the job. Daniel raises the same objection to "smile sheets," the post-learning surveys meant to capture learner reactions, as well as enrollment counts, and simple knowledge quizzes standing in for evidence of real application and productivity.
The Designer's Role: From Philosopher to Facilitator
The instructional designer's job has evolved as well. In Oviatt's early years, designers focused strictly on curriculum and learning objectives while a technical expert delivered the content from the front of the room.
“On a recent project, one of my project managers was someone who was not skilled in the technology or the sales but instead acted as a facilitator,” Oviatt said. “We had subject matter experts bring their expertise to the conversation, while this PM queued them up, asked engagement questions, moved slides along, and more.”
Today, a facilitator may not be steeped in the subject matter, but they know how to direct questions to the right person and identify gaps in understanding in the audience to make sure they get closed, all in real-time.
The Rise of AI
Artificial intelligence has collapsed timelines that once stretched across months. The three-ring binder manual that took Oviatt up to two years can now be drafted in minutes. But speed introduces its own hazard.
Daniel warns of “AI slop,” the flood of high-quantity, low-quality content that becomes possible when generation is nearly free. The real challenge, he suggests, is not producing more material but integrating it well and holding the line on quality, shifting the focus back from content output to genuine talent development.
Actionable Insights from the Field
What should today’s practitioners actually do with these observations? The experts point toward several clear practices.
Position L&D as an Enabler, Not the Owner
Daniel notes an important distinction: L&D leaders and teams create the conditions for growth rather than owning development outright. A framework that connects learning to employee aspirations for growth and development, he argued, sustains engagement far longer than any mandate.
Another concern is organizations that tell employees to “own their own development” and then step back. Daniel notes that left unsupported, people may get left behind. In his view, what holds the system together is deliberate scaffolding: coaching, peer-to-peer learning, and genuine executive sponsorship that make individual growth possible.
Diagnose Before You Design
Chris Wortmann, director of global talent management at Carnival Corporation, argued that effective programs begin with the business, not the request. Rather than building training because a stakeholder asked for a topic, teams should work backward from the behavior and capability they want to see. “The starting point is how is it [a learning initiative] connected back to your business?” Wortmann said. “If you don’t have that ‘why,’ it’s going to be really hard to communicate to employees why they’re going through any sort of learning intervention.”
This isn’t always easy when L&D departments are often asked by stakeholders to develop a specific training that may or may not align with the business. “What the stakeholder would like to see [developed], and what is missing, are often two different things,” Basheer said.
He encouraged being honest about the gap in expectations, while ensuring clear communication around the need for a specific initiative before measuring results accurately.
Focus on the Skills That Actually Matter and Measure Impact
Daniel draws a sharp line between organizations that succeed and those that spin their wheels. The winners resist the temptation to map every conceivable capability. “The ones that succeed are the ones that are focused on skills that are critical to the business, not 30,000 skills,” he said. Tying those skills directly to internal mobility, so that completing a program visibly unlocks opportunity, can keep learners engaged for the right reasons.
Measuring the outcomes of learning should follow a similar path. Daniel argued that while course completions, enrollment counts, and satisfaction surveys measure activity, the questions that matter are whether employees apply new skills on the job, work more productively, and move the business forward. That distinction becomes a discipline problem when teams lose sight of the organization's goals. “When you don't [align with the business], people pride themselves on the quality of their L&D, not the impact they have on the business,” Daniel said.
The Future of L&D
If content is now cheap and instantly available, what becomes scarce is the ability to evaluate it. That is where the future of learning points. Basheer captures the shift precisely: “The value isn't knowing how to use AI or how to do the task itself. It’s knowing what to ask, whether the answer is any good. Judgment used to be the finishing touch. Now it’s the core skill.”
AI still makes mistakes, and systems can hallucinate, which means leaders must audit outputs with strong analytical thinking rather than accept them at face value. There is a meaningful difference between AI fluency — knowing how to query a system and judge its answers — and mere software training — knowing which buttons to press. The former is what organizations should be building.
Despite these technology shifts, L&D’s mission of helping employees grow, contribute, and do their best work remains the same. The organizations that thrive in this AI-enabled future will be the ones that pair powerful new tools with sound human judgment.
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